The apostate

After graduating, Brock became a staff writer for Insight, the conservative Washington Times' magazine, and he describes his quick descent into a smothering culture where he found even more surrogate parent figures, like D.C. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman and his wife, Ricky, who served as vice chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Clarence Thomas. These powerful people were able, it seems, to cast a "spell" over him, bending him to suit their political purposes.

But Brock carries this theme to absurd degrees. Looking back at his Hill book, he admits that he was "already committed to a flawed interpretation of events," but claims "all the scrubbing, smoothing and polishing done by the editors only ended up producing a more persuasive -- and therefore more insidious -- form of propaganda." When mentioning that even the New York Times gives the book a good review, he praises his own skills, saying "the intricate fact war -- in which the mountain of assertions on each side could be disputed, rebutted or explained away by the other side -- had proven especially suited to my analytical mental bias ... in print I created an even more convincing appearance that I had caught Hill lying under oath."

OK, so it was Brock's manipulative brilliance that duped so many reviewers? Not so fast. "To the extent that the case incited a war of the sexes, it might also be worth noting that my favorable reviewers were mostly men." Apparently, Brock deserves credit for masterminding such a convincing treatise, but prejudiced reviewers deserve the blame for not seeing through his ruses.

And so it goes on. Brock describes how he let himself "get mixed up in a bizarre and at times ludicrous attempt by well-financed right-wing operatives to tar Clinton with sleazy personal allegations." Having become entangled, apparently, he could not help but be carried along. He seems to have made the calculation that, in order to get the readers of "Blinded by the Right" to like him, he has to depict himself as the innocent dupe of much greater minds.

This can be hard to swallow, as when Brock describes being approached, in the early fall of 1992, by a graybeard from the radical right who wanted him to check out a rumor about Bill Clinton's Arkansas past. The man paid Brock $5,000 out of pocket to look into the story. Brock allows that while this may seem "unusual and unethical for a journalist, in my mind it was no different from taking money from politically interested parties like the Olin and Bradley foundations" (which heavily funded projects at magazines such as the American Spectator, where Brock worked).

It's a transparent dodge; Brock wants to indict the journalism environment he had been seduced into overall, but taking money to consider a story is a bribe by anyone's definition. Brock, at this point 30 years old, was certainly experienced enough to know "in his mind" that this was wrong, and to take full responsibility for it.

After taking the money, Brock agreed to meet with several conspirators in the growing anti-Clinton movement. They tried to interest him in a supermarket tabloid-caliber story (later proved false) claiming that Clinton fathered a son by an African-American prostitute. "I tried not to laugh as I jotted down a few notes and promised -- tongue planted firmly in cheek -- to get right on the story."

Then, apparently, he pocketed the money and ran. Now, even though Brock admits to agreeing that the meeting was to be "kept in the strictest of confidence," he names those in attendance and invites us to giggle at them. That's easy enough to do -- they genuinely sound nuts -- but Brock's betrayal here is equally creepy. However zany the sources, the request that a meeting be "off the record" (and this one, as described by Brock, most certainly was) should still be honored. That the new and improved Brock now so easily eschews journalistic convention for the sake of a cheap laugh doesn't exactly cement our trust in him.

Nor, really, do his new friends. Some of the most startling revelations in "Blinded by the Right" come on Brock's acknowledgments page, where he thanks a liberal A-list -- including Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Salon columnist Joe Conason and Human Rights Campaign director Elizabeth Birch. Later in the book, perhaps to inoculate himself against charges that he's simply a hit man who's switched sides, Brock writes about how he "had to resist the fallacy of my first instinct, which was to adopt an 'us versus them' mentality in reverse and seek vengeance on the conservatives for spurning me. Instead I worked to find a separate sense of self and move on with my life."

It's inevitable, though, to wonder whether Brock is seeking vengeance -- and he clearly is -- in order to ingratiate himself with his new friends. I can't think of a single person on the political left who is maligned in this book, the one exception being the writer Christopher Hitchens, who once dined with Brock and is repaid with a particularly mean and random little slap. Hitchens, of course, is a vocal Clinton critic, who also happened to have had a very public falling out with his former friend Blumenthal after Hitchens alleged that the White House was trying to malign Monica Lewinsky.

When Brock is detailing his own mistakes and chronic bad behavior, he does seem utterly candid. And when he describes the machinations of the late Spectator's Arkansas Project -- aggressive investigations into the private life of Clinton funded with roughly $2 million from conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife -- he seems on fairly safe ground. "Blinded by the Right" contributes what appears to be concrete elaboration on the project (which was originally exposed and extensively covered in Salon by, among others, Conason).

That's hardly enough, though, to make you want to don an "I believe you, David" T-shirt. His superficially nasty portraits of media and political personalities like Drudge, Ingraham, Ann Coulter and John Podhoretz reek of payback, more than they resemble any quest for truth. With the notable exception of the above-mentioned incident of bullying a source into making a statement he knew was probably false, Brock's oeuvre was marked less by making up stuff than for distorting facts to match his own agenda. He brilliantly explains throughout "Blinded by the Right" how he did this over and over again during his long career on the right. And that gives us little reason to think that he's any more reliable now that he's on the left.

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